Ah. Okay.
What has come to be known as “open government”--the enhanced availability of data to the public through electronic means--will hopefully allow anyone interested in a subject area to be able to do better research, provide better input to public consultations, and improve their representations to government as a result.
This is a good thing, but it is not the only thing. And it does not mean that bringing in electronic open government will bring about a truly open government.
I've set out three ways that government information becomes public. I'll just skip through them quickly.
Because most, if not all, records now exist in electronic form, much more government information should be available on government websites. The access to information review task force report in 2001 set out a number of recommendations for improvement for the release of information. Recently a number of governments have gone down this road. The U.S., the U.K., Australia, and a number of sub-national governments, many of them municipalities, have undertaken this challenge.
There is no insurmountable challenge preventing the Government of Canada from moving forward with a similar initiative. Information Commissioner Legault has outlined several manageable concerns, some of which are common to open data schemes everywhere. Others, like the requirement of translation to meet official language requirements, legal and constitutional, are particular to this country and especially to the federal government.
In B.C., our Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act has been subject to three different committee reviews--there's a five-year review of the act--and each of the committees has recommended more routine release, more use of electronic data, and more routine disclosure by government. We have yet to see it.
The second method is access to information requests. If routine disclosure is the push from government out to its citizens and to the rest of us, access to information provides us, as citizens, with the ability to pull information from government. It's a complete code for making access requests. It also provides a process of review. It's a vital link in the chain of citizens’ ability to find out what their governments are doing, and it provides a balance between the rights of citizens to information and the legitimate requirements for confidentiality in certain clearly defined, limited circumstances. However, it was not intended as, nor should it be, the primary method of release. The primary method of release should be routine disclosure.
We won't go into the many deficiencies of the ATI system. This committee has gone through that. I will spare you a recap of it. We will come back to it, though, because the ATI system is vital for any true system of open government.
Finally, there's unauthorized unrequested release, which is basically what happens when there's no system, or it breaks down. It's leaks. WikiLeaks is an example. This is another way that information sometimes comes out.
In B.C. we also have a section in our act that puts an obligation on heads of public bodies to release information, even without a request, about a risk of significant harm to the environment or to the health or safety of the public or a group of people, or the disclosure of which, for any other reason, is clearly in the public interest.
I'd also like to take you through some potential pitfalls of open government. One is that open government, open data...essentially becomes electronic brochures. Government puts these up now, and what we have.... The risk is that government will just push favoured content out onto the web, that it will not be able to be manipulated by citizens, that it will not be in a very usable form.
There's probably no way around this. We have to have a certain measure of faith in our public servants and in our government that they will put out information that is...and will not unreasonably restrict the type of information being disseminated. However, that has not been the experience under ATI under different parties, different prime ministers, and different responsible ministers.
Without a way to compel disclosure, there is little reason to believe that the information that is routinely released will be much more than electronic brochures.
The reluctance of governments to allow broad disclosure of information they don’t favour releasing is very well understood, but a current instance in B.C., in which we are directly involved, provides an outstanding example.
We're involved in one of the longest-running FOI requests probably anywhere in this country. We're now into year seven of a contract between IBM and the provincial government. The government has taken us to court a number of times. They have invoked a number of exceptions. The exceptions have all been rejected. They're now off to court again.
Our ultimate point in this is that major government contracts should be readily available online for public scrutiny. The B.C. government has acknowledged the public interest in making contracts available by routinely posting public-private contracts online.
The government has not seen fit to put this contract up, despite the Information and Privacy Commissioner suggesting that this and similar contracts should be put online. The commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has said, “Proactively releasing these contracts would save everyone considerable time, money and paperwork.”
At the end of the day we may have to put it up ourselves, pending the result of litigation or a change of heart by the government. This should serve as a cautionary example for anybody who thinks that open data is something that will come about easily.
Another potential pitfall is that by becoming entranced with the potential of open data--and there is real potential--we bypass the access to information system and ignore the serious problems it has. The current information commissioner and her predecessors have appeared before you and outlined many of these. This committee has looked at this in the past and made reports attempting to remedy this situation.
It also appears that the amount of information being released is on a downward path. According to the information commissioner, “During the past ten years, the number of cases where all information has been disclosed has decreased from 41% to 16%.”
Much is being made of the idea of putting documents released through ATI online for everyone to see, but there is little point in doing this if requesters are essentially unable to get that information because the system is so dysfunctional.
This leads me to the other question. It is something we have run into in B.C. that we call “trompe l'oeil transparency”. We're currently involved in a complaint involving BC Ferries, which is a government-owned corporation that runs the ferry service in British Columbia. It was put back under the FOI regime late last year as a result of an investigation by the province’s comptroller general, who thought this would be a way of improving governance.
Their policy states that any records released to requesters will immediately be posted on the BC Ferries website. The result is that requesters are deprived of the first use of the information they obtain, which in turn takes away much of requesters’ motivation for investing the time and resources in making FOI requests. To state it plainly, we have here a covert attempt to stifle FOI requests in the guise of the noble aim of allowing greater public access.
If you make it so that the information you get is essentially unusable or you're not able to use it as a reporter or however, there will be fewer and fewer requests that will be posted online.
It's not the first time a public body has tried to do this, but BC Ferries is the first one to make it official policy and to use it to actively discourage requests.
The policy works this way. Requesters are required to go through the normal processes for FOI requests. BC Ferries charges fees to the person requiring the information, to the maximum permissible in every case. Any released records are posted to the BC Ferries website. If information is requested electronically, the requester will receive it at the same time it is posted. If sent in hard copy, the records will be posted within 24 hours of their being mailed to the requester.
We have direct experience with this. We had stuff sent to us. We got it three days after it went up.
I'm just going to move it along here. I'd like to conclude by saying that FIPA's view is that we have to ensure that overdue moves toward routine release and the use of technology to make government information more widely available must also make this information usable for all Canadians.
Canadians must also have the ability to request specific information from their government and to receive that information in a reasonable time at no or minimal cost. This means creating a functional system for access to information.
No one wants to head toward a dystopia where governments push out electronically information that no one uses or trusts, while occasional dumps of WikiLeaks-type documents raise the issue of serious damage to legitimate state, business, or personal interests.
We hope that your work on open government will be a big step toward bringing about real openness in government.
Thank you.